Razer CEO says "we all want" AI in game development, but not in the way you'd expect

One of the big focuses of Razer's slew of gaming gear announcements from the recent CES tech trade show was its use of AI. From an AI gaming headset to AI game assistants and AI game development tools, it covered a wide variety of approaches to using the new technology. Now, in a recent interview, the company's CEO claims that gamers should be celebrating the potential role of AI in game development.

As a maker of some of the best gaming mice, keyboards, laptops, and more, Razer is certainly well placed to make a judgment call on how AI is shaping the future of gaming. However, it's a bold strategy to so strongly come out in favor of its use in making games.

Talking to The Verge, Razer's CEO, Min-Liang Tan, was asked about Razer's embrace of AI and how it was potentially at odds with the attitude of gamers. In response, Tan said, "I would say that the question is, 'what are we unhappy with? […] I think we're unhappy with generative AI slop, right? Just to put it out there. And that's something that I'm unhappy with.

"Like any gamer, when I play a game, I want to be engaged, I want to be immersed, I want to be able to be competitive. I don't want to be served character models with extra fingers and stuff like that, or shoddily written storylines, so on and so forth. I think for us, we're all aligned against gen AI slop that is just churned out from a couple of prompts and stuff like that," Tan continued.

Coming to the crux of the point, though, Tan goes on to say that, "What we aren't against, at least, from my perspective, are tools that help augment or support, and help game developers make great games. And I think that's fundamentally what we are talking about at Razer, right?"

"So if we've got AI tools that can help game developers QA their games faster, better, and weed out the bugs, I think, along the way, we're all aligned, and we would love that."

"If we could get game developers to have the opportunity to create better, to check through typos and things like that, to create better games, I think we all want that. So I think that's the way that we see it."

Tan went on to give the example of quality assurance (QA) testing a game, which can be a time-consuming process that's less focused on creative input than simply grinding through a repetitive process of trying to break a game. While human input would still be used, better tools for automating the feedback could help QA testers "to be able to automatically fill in forms."

As for the broader impact of AI, not only was Tan strongly in favor of it not being used for the creative part of game development, but he also noted how he agrees with several of the reasons gamers are so unhappy at the role of AI in the world right now, saying, "there are other reasons why I think gamers are unhappy with AI, and I agree with them. I don't like slop either, right? That's one. Two, is it raising the cost of RAM? It is also raising the cost of RAM. I don't like that at the same time."

Rounding out his overall point, Tan concludes that "Back in the day, there was the GPUs versus crypto situation and things like that, and this is the same thing. So I do think, however, that all gamers would love better games, more fun games, more engaging games, and if AI can help create that by doing better QA, I mean, I'm all for it."